ABSTRACT
IN COMING CLOSER to a multicultural understanding of ethnic identity, this anonymous poem may seem a very light-hearted starting point. But like so many creations of popular culture, it is worth a second look. For one, it questions an ethnic category, namely, “coloured,” which is used by outsiders, usually “whites,” to label some sort of otherness. The label is in common use, but people can reject ethnic labels imposed on them, and ethnicity is thus a matter of contestation. The way in which this contestation
is argued is even more astute: The writer applies color terms to “white” people. Depending on their physical and mental states, people cease to be white and take on different colors; this shows that color identities, like all other identities, are a matter of situation and context. I may see and present myself, or be seen and received as, an exemplar of different colors at different times and in different contexts. By treating ethnicity as the same as color, the poem thus shows ethnicity as a matter of contestation within variable contexts, and thus as a social relationship.
